People matter in politics, which is a human rather than an academic exercise, and so Keir Starmer’s reshuffle of the shadow frontbench is significant even if Labour is not in power.
The Opposition leader has promoted competence and good communication. He has brought back Yvette Cooper, the respected chair of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, who was a minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Having spent five years monitoring the Home Office from the backbenches, she has a detailed grasp of her new brief and will know precisely how to put Priti Patel, the home secretary, on the spot over immigration, terrorism and knife crime.
Pat McFadden, the new shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, is one of the wisest MPs on the Labour benches who, as a Downing Street adviser and then a minister in the New Labour years, has weathered many political and financial storms. The MP for Wolverhampton South East, whose Midlands constituency gives him an instinctive understanding of the “red wall” seats that Labour lost at the last election and will hope to regain, is well-placed to help guide the party.
Starmer has also promoted good communicators from a new generation. Wes Streeting, who grew up on an east London council estate and has just recovered from cancer surgery, is the new shadow health secretary. This will be one of the most important jobs between now and the next general election. Streeting has a campaigner’s instinct as well as an ability to cut through to voters, drawn from an understanding of how tough life can be.
When I interviewed him for the Times magazine earlier this year, he described how as a child he had lost count of the number of times his home was suddenly plunged into darkness because the electricity meter had run out. “Even among the working-class kids, it felt like we were the poor working class,” he told me. “I’d go and play at my friends’ houses, but I would never want to invite them to our council flat because it just wasn’t a nice place to live. It was pretty bleak. It wasn’t decorated. It sometimes felt cold. We had problems with cockroaches from neighbours. I grew up feeling really unlucky and thinking, ‘We don’t have as much as other people.’”
His grandfather was a bank robber and he revealed to me that his grandmother had shared a prison cell with Christine Keeler, the woman at the centre of the Profumo scandal that rocked Harold Macmillan’s government in the 1960s. As he put it: “They were a bit like chalk and cheese. My nan was this working-class East End woman and Christine Keeler was high society, but they got on like a house on fire. I remember my nan’s really strong sense that this was an injustice, and that she felt really sorry for her.”
A gay, Christian Cambridge graduate who is also tough on crime and proud of his country, he is a street fighter with a populist streak. “We’ve given the impression in recent years that we’re more comfortable with other people’s flags than our own, and that’s a problem,” he told me. He will take the fight to the government over Covid and social care—the issues on which the next election will be fought and won.
David Lammy, the new shadow foreign secretary, will give Liz Truss a run for her money on social media as well as in the chamber. Like Streeting, he understands that politics must be a campaign as well as an argument—as his powerful interventions on the Grenfell Tower and Windrush scandals showed. The same is true of Bridget Phillipson, the new shadow education secretary, who was went to state school and could be an articulate advocate for reform. This is an open goal at a time when the education system is reeling from the impact of the pandemic and disadvantaged pupils have fallen behind their wealthier peers, yet so far the government has barely touched on schools in its plans for levelling up.
Peter Kyle, who has been promoted to shadow Northern Ireland secretary, is one of Labour’s best media performers with an easy manner and a way of cutting straight to the point. When I was writing a profile of him earlier this year, one former cabinet minister told me: “He should be in the shadow cabinet, on the frontline and never off TV. He speaks and thinks like a human being and a future star, if the Labour Party ever approaches being a competitive electoral party again.” Now that he is in the shadow cabinet, he is likely to be sent out to do television and radio interviews on areas beyond his frontbench brief.
Severely dyslexic, Kyle has a reading age of eight and so has never been one to learn the party script, which may be why he sounds more natural than some MPs trotting out the line to take. He will struggle with lengthy briefing papers on the Good Friday Agreement, but his experience also gives him a different perspective on the world. “I’ve always been good at reading other people’s emotions,” he told me. “I’ve been tested by systems, by people and by my own brain so much that now I know precisely who I am. I’ve been in situations where the pressure has been so great that I know where my limits are and I know where my breaking points are.” He has a ferocious work ethic. “I never coast,” he said. “For me, it’s on or off. I don’t have a dimmer switch. I learnt at the very beginning that I’m going to have to work harder than other people to do the same.”
Starmer’s new team is hungry for power and the leader has shown a ruthlessness that is required to get to the top—he demoted his predecessor Ed Miliband, for example. But changing the personalities is not enough. Labour may now have some better messengers, but it also needs a message that will get through to the voters.
To make his party electable, Starmer still needs to convince the country that Labour can be trusted to run the economy, which means distancing himself further from the Corbyn years. He and his new team must also come up with a credible programme of public service reform—on schools, hospitals and social care—that proves Labour is not just about spending money. There needs to be a stronger pitch on law and order and less focus on culture wars. The reshuffle this week may have been necessary, but it alone is not sufficient to get the party into government.
